How Dangerous is the World? Part III

Posted By Paul Miller Monday, December 19, 2011 - 11:27 AM

In my previous two posts I began my argument that the world today is actually more dangerous than it was during the Cold War. I argued that the basic threat of great power rivalry with China and Russia has not gone away and, in the case of China, has increased.

My second argument is that, in addition to Russia and China, we now face up to three new entrants in the lists of authoritarian nuclear powers hostile to the United States: North Korea, Iran, and possibly Pakistan. During the Cold War the United States faced only one or two hostile nuclear powers at a time. We may soon be facing five. And the new nuclear powers are likely to present a direct threat to the American homeland in the near future, similar to the threat posed by the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War.

North Korea and Pakistan have nuclear weapons (which they didn't during the Cold War) and Iran is almost certainly going to get them. North Korea and Iran are avowed enemies of the United States; Pakistan is teetering on the brink. All three states have invested in medium and long-range ballistic missiles that could hit U.S. allies and, in all likelihood, will soon be able to produce missiles that could hit the U.S. homeland.

It is true that North Korea's nuclear arsenal is probably very small, and Iran is likely to have a small arsenal for a few years yet. But they only need a few warheads to pose a major threat to the United States. The Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear warheads, but after the first hundred or so each additional nuclear weapon doesn't add much more threat to the United States: you can already wipe out our entire civilization several times over. Given a few more years, Iran and North Korea will both probably have built enough warheads and developed the long-range ballistic missiles to pose an existential threat to the United States equal to that posed by the Soviet Union's and China's nuclear arsenals during the Cold War.

In addition to their nuclear capabilities, all three states have some of the largest conventional forces in the world today. It is true that all three countries are poor and lack a sophisticated military-industrial base, and Iran's and North Korea's conventional militaries have been debilitated by sanctions. I don't doubt our ability to win a hypothetical conventional war with any state. But because of their sheer size, even strictly conventional, non-nuclear wars with Iran, North Korea, or (heaven forbid) Pakistan would surely be much more costly in lives and treasure than anything since Vietnam, and possible since World War II.

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How Dangerous is the World? Part I

Posted By Paul Miller Friday, December 16, 2011 - 3:25 PM

I largely agree with Peter's recent, insightful post about U.S. grand strategy, except when he says that "Compared to the Cold War period, we have more slack in our security environment." In this he echoes Kori's earlier contention that "The world is much more conducive to American interests than [during the Cold War]: we are militarily dominant, the threats to us are fewer and less apocalyptic, our allies are more capable to handle their own problems, our enemies less so, and our values on the ascendancy." This seems to be a fashionable view. I recently heard an experienced foreign policy wonk claim at an event in D.C. that the United States currently faces "the lowest level of existential threat in U.S. history.

I disagree quite strongly -- not because the Cold War was such a wonderfully safe era, but because ours is more dangerous. Peter and I have both heard the view from our students that the Cold War was, on hindsight, a time of roses and sunshine, and I think he is right to criticize it. Our young students confuse simplicity with safety. It was a simple, dangerous world: nuclear war was simply terrifying. I am (just) old enough to have a living memory of the Cold War and the feeling of dread and danger it fostered. We were still doing duck-and-cover drills when I was in the 3^rd grade. (Which always made me wonder: if my 3rd grade desk was nuclear-bomb-proof, why didn't they make the Pentagon out of the same material?)

Peter is right that the Cold War was ridiculously dangerous. During the Cold War the Soviet Union and China had nuclear and conventional capabilities superior to what North Korea and Iran have today, and the United States lost some 95,000 troops in two bloody wars in Korea and Vietnam. During the Cold War the United States and Russia competed globally; any local conflict had the potential to escalate into global war in which the American homeland would be directly threatened. This was without doubt a dangerous era.

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Big problems in Baku, and the man to deal with them

Posted By David J. Kramer Tuesday, August 17, 2010 - 10:50 AM

In my last posting, I praised Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's early July trip to Poland and Georgia but noted I had reservations about her stop in Baku. Despite the passage of a few weeks, those concerns have not gone away. Nor have worries about the direction in which Azerbaijan is heading. Making matters worse, the United States has been without an ambassador in Azerbaijan for more than a year and the current nominee has been delayed in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC).

In what was an otherwise good trip to the region, Clinton offered the wrong answers during a joint press availability with Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov. In her opening comments, Clinton offered hope that some "difficult cases" involving media freedom and the status of civil society would get resolved in Azerbaijan. But then in response to a question concerning human rights in the country, Clinton touted "a lot of progress" in Azerbaijan in the last 18 years. Her amplification of that initial response only muddied the waters further:

And we continue to support the efforts that are undertaken by the government to expand and protect free expression and independent media, and have called that more be done because we think these are pillars of democracy. I have in the past, and did again, raise the cases of the two young men. And it is something that has a great deal of attention focused on it, not only in our country but around the world.

So, we believe that there has been a tremendous amount of progress in Azerbaijan. But as with any country, particularly a young country -- young, independent country like this one -- there is a lot of room for improvement." [emphasis added]

What efforts to expand and protect free expression and independent media? Sadly, there have been none in Azerbaijan. It is good that democracy and human rights issues are "part of our ongoing dialogue," as Clinton said, but it is important that she get her talking points right. It is good that Clinton raised the case of the two bloggers -- Adnan Hajizada and Emin Milli, jailed last year on spurious charges of hooliganism after they themselves were attacked by unknown assailants -- but within 24 hours of Clinton's departure from Baku, a court sentenced another journalist, Eynulla Fatullayev, to prison for a third time after finding him guilty of "storing drugs" while in jail. Coming immediately after Clinton's visit to Baku, the sentencing of Fatullayev showed real disrespect toward the U.S. secretary of state. In addition, an appeal by one of the jailed bloggers, Hajizada, several weeks later, was rejected by a court because he hadn't admitted guilt or exemplified good behavior while in prison.

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Shadow Government is a blog about U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration, written by experienced policy makers from the loyal opposition and curated by Peter D. Feaver and William Inboden.